


Bat in the Cave

by katethereader



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: (sorta) - Freeform, Baby Fic, F/M, Post-ACOWAR, Pregnancy, Prompt Fill, a missing healer, a panicking mor, and a subsequent midwife!Lucien, feat. two different illyrian males fainting, feysand baby - Freeform, ready for a feysand baby, the gang's all here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 12:32:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11036265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katethereader/pseuds/katethereader
Summary: A series of vignettes following a Feysand pregnancy and a celebration of the joy of childirtha.k.a Rhys can't stop hovering, Feyre just wants to fly, and the entire Inner Circle gets to experience the miracle of birth, complete with a kitchen fire, an MIA healer, and not one but two fainting Illyrian males.





	Bat in the Cave

**Author's Note:**

> This was an anonymous prompt fill (sorta). The original prompt read "Something with a very pregnant Feyre and a flustered and stressed out Rhys?" And this originally started as just that and then... became this. Enjoy?

Feyre felt odd. She couldn’t quite describe why. It was like a muscle was sore or she had a bruise. But it wasn’t either of those. And it wasn’t painful. It was merely a sensation. Something about her was different.

She felt it in her gut. Figuratively and literally. She hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. The last fifty years since the war had been as uneventful as the last few weeks had. She’d gone dancing at Rita’s and had brunch with her sisters. She’d gone hiking with Lucien and shopping in the Rainbow with Rhys. They’d made dinner together every night the last two weeks, trying their hand at domesticity. And every night after their admittedly terrible dinners, he’d carry her up the stairs and make love to her all night.

It was the same as always, with a few extra burned meals in the mix.

And yet something about her stomach felt off, and she was sure it wasn’t the food. She couldn’t think of anything else it might be. Until the answer was staring her right down the nose.

She felt this sensation in her stomach. It was both other and familiar. Natural. All she’d done the last few weeks was spend her days with her friends and her nights with her mate.

Her mouth fell open. She was pregnant. She felt the realization travel down the bond, without even trying to send it. It was like it was out of her control. She dropped the basket of berries she held in her hand. Rhys was there before they hit the ground. He’d winnowed the small distance across the room, not wanting to waste any time on the walk across the townhouse kitchen.

When the berries hit the ground, his arms were on hers and he was kissing her. It was sweet and loving, but hard.

He pulled away, but not fully, resting his forehead against hers as he desperately sucked in breaths. And then he laughed. And she did too.

“Is it true?” he asked, boyish excitement in his voice. “Can it possibly be true?”

She wasn’t sure. She said as much down the bond. They’d need to see a healer to know for sure. But… “I think so,” she said.

“We’re going to be parents, Feyre,” he said. “I’m going to be a dad.” And then she cried. Big fat happy tears. And he did too.

* * *

“Rhys I _need_ them,” Feyre groaned, pouting. She knew she was being childish. But she was only seventy years old, after all. She felt like she deserved it.

“Feyre, they’re a seasonal menu item. I can’t just make the bakery make them for you,” he said, trying to reason with her.

“Why not?” she whined. Mother and Cauldron, was she annoying. “You’re the High Lord. And I’m the High Lady. I’m the pregnant High Lady. And I want beignets from Loretta’s. Can’t you just make her make them?”

“That’s an obscene abuse of power and you know it, darling,” he said, gently running a knuckle down her cheek.

“I’m huge and sore and tired and you’re going to deny me the only thing I want in the whole world?” she teased. “And I thought you were supposed to be the good high lord.”

“First off,” he countered. “You’re not huge. You’re barely even showing.” He pulled away the pillow she had resting in her lap to prove his point. Her stomach had noticeably rounded, and her skin was just starting to glow, but he was right. She was not huge. “Second, I’m sure there are _other_ things in this world you might want.”

He proved that point by flashing her a devilish grin. Her pout turned into a conspiratorial smile as she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. He pushed her book and the extra pillows aside to make room for himself on the bed as he crawled up on top of her.

She signaled him with a small movement and he flipped them over, lying on his back so she could straddle him. “I guess I’m starting to see your point,” she said.

She reached down to unbutton his pants when she was interrupted by a loud growl. Not either of them. But her stomach.

“Or maybe not,” she followed up. “I guess you’re not as good as beignets.”

“I guess not,” Rhys grumbled, hauling himself off the bed to find some kind of suitable substitute for Loretta’s winter special.

* * *

She watched his eyes shift out of focus for a brief moment as he slid closer to her, on the defensive.

“What is it, Rhys?” she asked.

“I just got a message from Cassian,” he said. “Nothing too major. A cafe caught fire near the Sidra. Almost two dozen were injured, and the building was destroyed but that seems to be the worst of it. No fatalities. Just a lot of burns.”

“Well, you should go,” Feyre said. “Show your face, speak with the victims and their families. You’re their High Lord. It’s where you belong.”

“I belong right here, beside my High Lady,” he said, pulling her closer to him on the couch. “Besides, it appears as if Cassian and Nesta are handling it.”

“My sister is there?” she asked, tenting her book on her round stomach. “Then you really should go.”

“Fifty years hasn’t softened her much, has it?” he joked.

“Marble doesn’t tend to soften,” she quipped back. After a beat, she added, “Rhys, I’m really okay if you need to go. I doubt he’s coming today.”

His eyes tracked her finger to her stomach, to the baby.

“No, I’ll stay. I would go if I needed to.” She trusted his promise, knowing his integrity as a leader.

Feyre stood to use the restroom and Rhys helped her up, then walked her to the door. When she stepped out, he was still standing there, arms outstretched to lead her back to the couch.

“Rhys,” she said, “You’re hovering again.”

“Right. Right,” he said, stepping away. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, darling. You know I love you. I just need to be my own person also,” she said, teasing.

“I know, I know,” he reminded her. “I’m doing my best. But the mate in me is having a hard time coping right now.”

“The healer warned us it would get worse the closer he is to coming out,” she said, rubbing her now huge stomach. It looked very much like she had snuck a melon under her shirt.

Rhys had insisted that very first day, just after they’d cleaned up the spilled berries, that the healer would come by once a week. Even the healer herself had insisted that was too often. But one look at his face told them all that this was an area in which he would not budge.

At their last appointment, the healer said the baby was likely coming in the next week. She’d be surprised if he wasn’t born by their next appointment.

That was two days ago, and Feyre was growing impatient.

She had to admit the coddling and constant doting had been fun for a little while. But now, she wanted her body back. She wanted to run and fly and spar with Cass and get out of Rhys’s watchful eye every once in a while.

But most of all, she wanted to see her son. Her beautiful baby boy.

She and Rhys both knew it was a boy that grew inside her. The Bone Carver had as much as told them. They’d prepped the nursery for him and spent days early on in the pregnancy walking through town buying baby clothes. The only thing they hadn’t done in preparation for his arrival was pick a name. That was something they decided against one night together. They might know his sex and his face, but they didn’t know him. They wouldn’t and couldn’t until birth. And that’s what really mattered in naming. So he was simply still The Baby to them. But that didn’t change how badly Feyre wanted to finally see him, to hold him in her arms.

Her stomach growled. “How can I possibly be hungry again?” she asked. Feyre felt as if she’d eaten all the food the city could provide and then some. Their nights spent learning to cook all those months ago had actually paid off, and the nights of burned meals became nights of gourmet ones as Rhys picked up skill.

But her favorite thing he made was his risotto. She asked for it practically every night now. The Baby liked it too, she imagined. It was all she craved now. Well, that and the beignets. But to Rhys’s eternal annoyance, now that the beignets really were in season, their novelty had worn off. And Feyre didn’t want them quite so much anymore.

“We have leftovers in the kitchen,” he said. “There’s more risotto from last night, or there’s some fruit, or I could make you a sandwich.”

“Must you even ask?” Feyre replied with a smile, one which Rhys returned.

He set to work reheating last night’s dinner. In the fifty years they’d lived here together, it had slowly transformed from his townhouse to their townhouse, pieces of each of them and both of them, sprouting out across the space. As she’d done with her house in the small human village and with the cabin where she and Rhys had mated, she’d started painting. She painted vines of delicate flowers up the banisters. She’d painted Velaris, the glorious Rainbow and the glittering Sidra. Over the Sidra she’d painted an imaginary, glowing bridge. The one she’d always felt tethering her to Rhys. Behind the city were the glorious mountains, and the stars. The stars stretched up and up and up, overtaking the ceiling.

The paint she and Rhys had found in the Rainbow had some type of property in it that made it glow in the dark. Every night when the sun went down, the kitchen glowed with Starlight as if the ceiling wasn’t there at all.

And Rhys stood in the middle of this ragtag painted mess, his hair askew and his eyes bright, watching the stove as he heated her meal.

Feyre had an itch she hadn’t had in a while. She had an itch to draw, to sketch. She needed to capture the beautiful male in front of her somehow, so she could savor this moment forever.

She slid herself off the bar stool where she sat and Rhys’s eyes instantly went to her. “I’m just going to the study to grab something. Don’t move,” she said.

He looked back down at the food and pretended like he wasn’t completely monitoring her every move. But she knew he was. And she was okay with that.

She grabbed her sketchbook and a pencil and started the slow pad back to the kitchen. Everything became exponentially more difficult when there was the equivalent of a large melon growing out of your abdomen. She had almost made it back when she felt a strange pinch. He was shifting. Moving. Then, a whoosh.

Only she felt the sensation, but both her and Rhys heard the sound of water splashing the floor after soaking her loose fitting pants.

The color drained from Rhys’s face as he stood there, mouth agape.

One moment passed. Two. Three.

“I think my water just broke.”

The birth process was something they’d gone over with the healer about a million times. Rhys wanted to know the procedure front to back so he could operate smoothly in the moment. But, though he had hundreds of years of battle and war experience under his belt, he seemed to turn to jelly under this pressure.

“Call the healer,” she said.

His eyes glazed over momentarily as he reached out to someone to send the healer.

Moments later, Cassian and Nesta burst into the room, Az right on their tails. “What are they doing here?” Feyre shrieked.

“All the healers in Velaris are treating the victims of the accident. Yours said she can’t make it.”

“Can’t make it?” Rhys whirled on the three new guests, looking very much like the Death Incarnate he’d always referred to himself as. “I am her High Lord,” he said. “And her High Lady is in labor. And she _can’t make it_?”

“Rhys, calm down. The birth is hours away,” Feyre said.

Azriel stepped out from behind Cass and Nesta, and looked towards Feyre.

“What can we do to make you more comfortable?” Az asked.

“Calm him down,” Feyre said, pointing at the still heaving Rhys. “I’m fine now, my water just broke. That means I’ll start labor at any—” she was cut off by a sharp abdominal pain. It wasn’t dissimilar to the menstrual cramps she’d grown up with, but now they were more concentrated, and a little more intense. She reached forward and gripped the countertop at the sudden pain and sucked in a sharp breath. Rhys was over her in an instant, hands everywhere, feather-light, searching for some way to alleviate the pain. Feyre counted slowly in her head.

Thirty-four seconds. Thirty-four seconds and then it was gone.

“If the healer can’t make it,” she said, “find someone who can.”

Cassian nodded an affirmative and was gone.

“He has no idea what he’s doing,” Az said, shaking his head. “I’ll be back.”

And then he too was gone. Leaving a hunched over, very pregnant Feyre, a concerned, hovering Rhys, and a still, stoic Nesta standing in the townhouse kitchen.

* * *

Cassian returned with Amren, Mor, and Elain about six minutes later. “I didn’t know who to bring, so I brought them,” was his answer upon setting them all down in the room. He looked downright lost. He very obviously had very little idea what he was doing.

If Feyre thought Rhys was a panicking mess, Mor was like Rhys on steroids. Her hair was frizzy and her eyes were wide. “What do we do? What do we do?” she kept repeating. “Females can die in childbirth you know.”

“Really not helping, Mor,” Cass reminded her.

“Right,” she said. “Right. You probably won’t die, Feyre. No worries.”

“Mor, I’d shut your mouth right about now,” Rhys said. “Before I hop in your mind and shut it myself.”

Mor quieted. None of them were sure to what degree Rhys was joking.

“Are any of you of any use to me at all?” Feyre asked the large group. There were too many people for the room.

Rhys had gently picked her up and moved her to the living room once Cass and Az had left, Nesta criticizing and micromanaging his every move.

“If you do anything to hurt my sister or my nephew, I’ll cut your dick off, High Lord or no,” she’d said to him as he’d carried her to the couch.

“Please don’t,” Feyre had said. “That happens to be one of the most agreeable parts of him.”

Now they all stared back at her and her somehow inappropriate question. Feyre took it to mean no, they were not useful in any significant way.

Elain looked as if she was about to defend her usefulness in the situation in some way, when suddenly everyone noticed the smell of smoke. And then they saw it begin to crawl across the ceiling out of the kitchen.

“My risotto,” Feyre whined. She’d dumbly hoped that maybe amid this chaos she wouldn’t be denied that one pleasure. She’d been wrong.

“You left the stove on?” Nesta shrieked. “What, are you trying to kill us? What kind of idiot leaves the _stove on_?”

“I’m sorry, Nesta. I was a little preoccupied with my mate’s water breaking,” Rhys said sarcastically, voice escalating.

“I’m sure you were really busy making sure she was accommodated. That’s why she’s half laying on the couch and there’s still no healer,” Nesta fired back.

Cass stepped in to try to intervene, but in typical Cassian fashion only managed to make things exponentially worse. Soon, everyone was either yelling at eachother or trying to yell over the yelling to tell everyone to stop yelling.

And then Feyre’s second contraction came. She counted back the time. Just over ten minutes since her last one. They were coming quickly.

She inhaled sharply, tensing at the pain in her abdomen. This was definitely worse than the last. There was a pinching at her lower back that made her bite down a yelp.

Everyone quieted, immediately turning towards her. No one moved except Rhys who smoothed her hair off her forehead and Az and Lucien, who winnowed into the room. Lucien took in the room and Feyre, then knelt down in front of the couch right beside Rhys. Feyre’s pain ended and she loosed a breath. Sweat had started to bead on her forehead.

“How long was that one?” Lucien asked.

“Forty-one seconds,” Feyre said.

“How many have you had?”

“That was only the second. There was about twelve minutes between them.”

“They’re coming quickly,” he said, affirming her thought. He turned to the rest of the circle, looking at all their dumbfounded expressions. They were very much out of their element. “Has anyone bothered to get her wet rags or something warm?” No one moved. “You’re all useless. Come on, people, this is your High Lady.”

Az turned around and went into the kitchen, retrieving two wet cloths. Lucien took them, placing the cold one on Feyre’s forehead. She hissed at the sudden cold but instantly felt relief. Lucien placed a hand near her abdomen and searched her eyes. She nodded, giving him permission to do whatever it was he was about to do. He slid his hand under her lower back and lifted gently, creating just enough space to slide the other rag beneath her back. When he lowered her back down, the warmth of the rag against that painful part of her back could have made her moan.

“What do we do now?” Rhys asked, depthless panic in his eyes.

“We all calm down, for Cauldron’s sake, and we take her upstairs.”

 

Feyre hadn’t imagined the actual birthing in too much detail, mainly just the moments after when she first held her beautiful boy.

But even in the briefest moments of imagining the birth process itself, she had never imagined a scenario like this.

All her closest friends and her sisters were flitting about her bedroom, trying and failing to find a way to be anything but disruptive. Rhys was—surprise, surprise—anxiously hovering and Lucien was her midwife.

Perfect.

But somehow, amidst the chaos, order was found. And soon; they were all working semi-cohesively to make this delivery happen.

Lucien was surprisingly experienced, it seemed, and knew exactly what to do to keep Feyre comfortable through every step of the process.

She was exhausted and short of breath, but she asked, “Lucien, how do you…?”

She trailed off, but he understood. “Growing up, I spent most of my time outside our manor. You know why. I would spend time in the towns and villages of our farmers, and pretty quickly learned some tools of the trade when it came to birth. I’ve mainly only worked with horses, but so far it’s all pretty similar.”

Feyre didn’t have the energy to be offended, so she simply said, “Thank you, Lucien. You’re doing a wonderful job.”

The contractions became increasingly more painful and after only an hour and a half, Lucien informed her it was time to start pushing. He stood at the foot of the bed, along with a stone-faced Nesta. Mor and Amren were tasked with running up new basins of water and towels for the delivery process every few minutes. Elain was acting as nurse for the baby, as soon as he arrived. She had a bath and blankets and scissors and bandage ready for him.

Cassian said he wanted to help initially, but as soon as Feyre was instructed to remove her pants, he left, citing a lack of desire to “see whatever was going on down there.”

Rhys stood at her side, hovering over her and clutching her hand tightly. Azriel hovered over him, for a reason Feyre didn’t understand.

But it quickly became clear. The next contraction came and Feyre began to scream.

“Push!” Lucien shouted. Feyre pushed with everything she had, grounding herself with the grip she had on Rhysand. But then his grip went slack as he passed out. That’s why Az had been hovering.

Azriel caught Rhys before he hit the ground, pulling him up to rest against his own chest.

“Rhys, by the cauldron, you had better wake up,” Feyre yelled. She sounded haggard. She felt haggard. “I am not about to birth our son while you lie on the floor. I can not deal with two babies in this room right now.”

And at her words, he came to. And when he did, it was her Rhys, not labor-panic Rhys, who emerged from the fog.

His eyes were clear and focused and ready to help. He stood and took her hand just as the next contraction came. He held her hand and smoothed her hair and surrounded her with his gentle, soothing darkness as Lucien again shouted for her to push, and she again began to scream.

Feyre sobbed when she heard the small wail, when the baby emerged and Lucien immediately passed it to Elain, who took a clean wet towel and cleaned the baby of the blood and fluid which covered it.

“It’s… a girl,” Lucien said, breathless.

“An Illyrian girl,” Elain amended.

Rhys let out a disbelieving laugh, his eyes alight. The baby continued to cry as the first full minute passed and Elain and Nesta together clamped and cut the umbilical cord. Then they wasted no time in passing her to Feyre.

She took her in her arms and felt at once complete. She rested in the crook of her arms so perfectly. And she was beautiful. She had a button nose, adorably scrunched in her crying. Her hands were small, so small, the fingers could barely be an inch.

Rhys slid down on the bed beside her, laying one arm around Feyre’s shoulders and the other coming to circle Feyre’s hold around the baby. Their baby. Their daughter.

Feyre could have sworn that everything else in the world disappeared. It was just the three of them, the two beautiful mates and their new beautiful child. She was the perfect blend of the two of them. And no matter what the Bone Carver had shown them, no matter what tricks he’d been trying to play, Feyre knew now, this baby girl was her destiny. She belonged here as much as every other person in this room.

Her crying settled, the wailing subsided, as she lay cuddled in Feyre’s embrace. She turned in to Feyre’s chest, nuzzling and quieting. Feyre let out a small sob, a combination of happy tears and disbelieving laughs. Rhys leaned down and kissed the top of their daughter’s head, his own tears slipping down to splash on Feyre’s chest.

“Cassiopeia,” Feyre breathed. She remembered the story of the constellation only vaguely. It had been a lifetime since she’d sat in that small house in the human village and watched the stars with her father. He used to tell her of the constellations and how they would help him navigate while he was working, sailing across the oceans. He would say the constellations always guided him home. Cassiopeia was a vain, beautiful queen. And Feyre hoped her daughter would never be as vain as the legend, but she knew she would one day be as devastatingly beautiful.

“Cassie,” Rhys agreed. Cassie. Daughter of Feyre and Rhysand.

Everything was perfect.

And then the door burst open and Cassian stumbled in, already mid-sentence. “Is it over? I heard the screaming stop and it got real quiet so I figured you were either done or dead!”

His joke didn’t have time to land, because his new spot in the room gave him a perfect and unavoidable view of the birth site, and the bloody mess it had become. And he fainted.

Nesta groaned. “I’ve got him.”

“I can help,” chimed in another voice. The healer. She’d finally arrived.

“Good timing, ma'am,” Rhys said, giving her a somewhat passive aggressive salute.

And just like that, the chaos and enormity of birth slipped back into routine. And all was well.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Please leave a kudos or a comment (it would be greatly, greatly, greatly appreciated!). And if you have your own prompts/requests, direct them to my tumblr as box at feyrearch.tumblr.com/ask 
> 
> Thanks


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